Welcome to the Basel Face Database Website
The Basel Face Database (BFD) is built upon portrait photographs of forty different individuals. All these photographs have been manipulated to appear more or less agentic and communal (Big Two personality dimensions) as well as open to experience, conscientious, extraverted, agreeable, and neurotic (Big Five personality dimensions). Thus, the database consists of forty photographs of different individuals and 14 variations of each of them signaling different personalities. Using this database therefore allows to investigate the impact of personality on different outcome variables in a very systematic way.

Update 2023/05/17:
A set of faces manipulated regarding perceived risk taking has been integrated into the database.

The BFD has been developed by Mirella Walker and colleagues at the University of Basel, Switzerland. The BFD can be used freely for non-commercial scientific research (Request).

More information about the database, including examples, can be found under Details.

Citations
Please use the following reference when you cite the BFD:

Walker, M., Schönborn, S., Greifeneder, R., & Vetter, T. (2018). The Basel Face Database: A validated set of photographs reflecting systematic differences in Big Two and Big Five personality dimensions. PloS one, 13(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193190

If you use the risk-taking versions of the BFD, please additionally refer to:

Walker, M., Lambertus, M., Mata, R., & (2023, May 16). The Janus face of risk taking: Understanding laypeople’s representations of risk taking from face impressions. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/g97wr